Why don't they mandate that every well has a pre-existing "safety valve" well before they let them pump oil? If they had one on site, they could relieve pressure right now rather than having to hustle ships out there and start drilling after the accident has occurred. It would save months of oil dumping in the gulf.

Because it would cost a lot of money to drill a second well just in case. And oil companies don't like to pay a lot of money for things that may not be needed. And politicians don't like to piss off oil companies.

Art Vandelay wrote:Because it would cost a lot of money to drill a second well just in case. And oil companies don't like to pay a lot of money for things that may not be needed. And politicians don't like to piss off oil companies.

I think the take-aways from this are a) they're obviously lying when they said they thought this would never happen, and b) they obviously didn't work on coming up solutions based on what they should have learned 31 years ago. I don't think it's an overstatement to say that something is terribly wrong when we have to rely on the Costner family to innovate and finance in the realm of oil spill cleanup.